SPONSORS: Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey - TÜBITAK

ABSTRACT: Large scale search engines employ various efficiency
optimizations to generate accurate and fast answers for hundreds of millions
queries submitted daily. To this end, one of the most widely used mechanisms is
caching the results pages for the most popular and/or recent queries, and
forwarding the result page to the users when the same query is repeated.

In this project, we propose new
approaches that take into account the latest advancements in the research
literature and industry for result caching in search engines. Most of the
earlier studies in the field of result caching focus on deciding on which query
results to store in the cache. Another equally important but rather overlooked
aspect of the issue is the freshness of cached results: clearly, providing query
results that date back to a month ago would not satisfy the users. On the other
hand, it should also be considered that the freshness period of queries are not
all the same; for some queries, the results may be valid for, say, weeks,
whereas for some others (i.e., for those related to popular events), the results
may need to be updated daily, or even hourly. In this project, we will
investigate different strategies that aim to determine the freshness of a query
result in the cache and refresh those results that are found to be outdated.